Late last year as many of you know I rejoined Nokia in a part-time capacity, supporting developer outreach. I neglected this blog a bit because I was focusing most of my attention on our local Windows Phone meetup site, but that’s about to change.

Going forward, I wil transition the bulk of my community support activity to this blog, as well as two twitter accounts: @NokiaDevNorthTX (was @DFW_WPDEV) and my old generic account, @texrat. The latter is blessed with the most followers, but they’re so diverse (and include many people disinterested in Windows Phone) that I will use @NokiaDevNorthTX for highly-focused Windows Phone activity. Still, expect at least few retweets on the @texrat side!

Last year I sponsored and otherwise supported some fun meetups and events, and 2013 will be no different. January starts off with the North Texas Smartphone App Competition 2013, followed closely by a local instance of the 2013 Global Game Challenge. Both events will also have preliminary meetups. We’ll also be holding regular group meetups at Nokia’s Irving site starting in January. The first meeting will cover many topics, and my hope afterwards is to have one major topic for each meetup. We’ll have a really exciting one for April oriented around usability and accessibility, and I’m also putting one together (probably for March) with the theme of creating compelling apps. I’ll be bringing in guest speakers from various companies and organizations, and looking for volunteers!

Speaking of meetups, the DFW meetup group grew fairly well in 2012, finishing the year at 107 members. Out of that number, there were about 20 or so really active participants, some of whom have flirted with the Nokia DVLUP Leaderboard (must be registered to view; ask me about that if you aren’t) and quite a few winning prizes and awards for their work.

One thing to note: for reasons unclear to me, I have lost co-organizer status at the DFW meetup group. This means I can no longer organize meetups or events on that site, or even update resource pages I created. I will therefore be exploring other options… possibly Eventbrite.

I was also a little discouraged at low participation in certain community challenges, so I’m looking for feedback on how to do better this year. Let me know any ideas you have for incentives and contests.

As for DVLUP… it’s still a Canada/USA program only for now and I know that frustrates those of you outside those countries. Nokia of course recognizes the need to expand this opportunity so I hope you’ll be ready to jump in when it’s available to you. It’s become quite popular and the development team has been hard at work fixing bugs and implementing new features. Participant feedback is key!

Of course, while Windows Phone consumes the bulk of my community work these days, I’m still involved in other initiatives. I’m on the board of directors for a local Make organization, still interested in 3D printing, and helping Digia as I can with local Qt meetups. But I did drop some other activities due to time constraints. I can only be stretched so thin, unfortunately.

Anyway, there’s going to be a lot going on this year and I have my work cut out for me. Soon I hope to beef this site up a bit and make it a truly useful resource for you.